Fools

by Joan Silber

  “We live in a house of fake feeling,” Adinah said. “You have to pretend every day to hold anything I say in any regard at all.”

  “You don’t listen to me!” I said, not intelligently.

  “If I do, it’s to humor you.”

  “Very nice.”

  “You don’t even bother to humor me,” she said

  “You want me to say, Yes, I do?”

  There was a bad pause. “This isn’t the way to live,” she said. “By lying. I have to tell you, I’m going.”

  “Go,” I said.

  I didn’t mean it, not really. I said it out of hardness—Go if you’re going—but I wanted us to stay together. I seemed to want many things. I wanted Becky, who was still in her twos, to cuddle up with me; I wanted Adinah to be with me on life’s highway; I wanted to patrol the world of cruelty with my mighty lens; I wanted the old side of my sexual nature to be free again.

  What did Adinah want? Not me. She was stuck on the notion of me as bogus and false and fake, as well as loutish and unsuitable. I was in the way of what she hoped to be. How had we ever started? She said I wasn’t much of a father anyway, and maybe she was right. We said things we never should have said, and in the end I was the one who left the premises. Out of the Door and down in the street all alone. I had Becky on weekends. She cried when I came to take her with me and she cried when I dropped her off. Why were we doing this? Who was happier?

  And Adinah wasn’t above making extra demands about money, inventing things they couldn’t do without. “Don’t act so surprised at what stuff costs,” she said.

  “I thought you were such a good Sufi,” I said.

  “We think the world is real,” she said. “You never got any of this right. It’s all God, but veiled. I don’t know why I’m even talking to you about it.”

  “Because I’m Mr. Moneybags,” I said. Becky was throwing her wooden blocks at my knees while we spoke. “Cut it out,” I said. “Right now.” How could we go on this way?

  We got used to it. Becky had her own room in the apartment I had in the Haight, a room with a pink record player and a dollhouse. She called me Daddy Dad Dad in case I forgot who I was. Adinah had a Sufi college student, a nice girl with an early version of punk hair, move in to help with the rent, although I was covering most of it, and she got work as a dog walker, which didn’t pay that badly.

  I took up with the redhead at work—why not?—and I at least had my head always flooded with erotic afterimages. It startled me to be charged with so much sensation at the will of someone so other—I hardly knew her, compared to Adinah—and I was newly amazed by the mystery of these reactions. She had another boyfriend somewhere herself, so we had a good understanding.

  Once I was late to pick up Becky because of her, and another time I actually forgot it was my night and I didn’t show up. How could I forget? I was too unfeeling and selfish to be anyone’s father. I lived in this truth for a month and stayed away—I yelled back at Adinah when she phoned, I wouldn’t take her calls at work, I experimented with being a total prick. Why pretend different? And then (when I woke up in sudden anguish) I begged to see Becky again, and Adinah let me. I guess she had to. I was so glad to see her, my Becky with her fat cheeks. But things were always a little fucked up after that.

  At work I did a feature with a reporter who wrote about the resourcefulness of the homeless. I had been waiting for an assignment like this. I got shots of a man who’d trained his dog to panhandle with a cup tied to its paw, a guy in a wheelchair who’d rigged up a Mylar umbrella for an awning, a mother washing dandelion greens in a fountain to feed to her kids. I kidded around, I thanked them for their time. Some of them wanted a little payment—which we weren’t supposed to give as journalists—and some of them were embarrassed by all of it.

  The photos had respect in them, I didn’t make them cloying. I could do that much. Adinah said, “Excellent work,” which pleased me greatly. She of all people could see why I wanted to remind the public that the unmoneyed were actually real humans.

  She looked trim and healthy these days, in her jeans and her striped polos, with more color in her face. All that dog-walking was doing her good. Oh, yes, she was thinking of branching out and starting her own walking service. Adinah as an entrepreneur? “Not just me,” she said. “With someone.”

  Her co-walker was a guy named Marty, who answered the door to the apartment one morning when I showed up—a tall guy with hair like a big black mop. Okay, I didn’t like him, how could I? Becky was clambering all over him, giggling. He was no mere business acquaintance. Adinah was still in her bathrobe. “’Morning, man,” he said to me. He called Adinah “Deen,” he called Becky “Beck.” Who the hell did he think he was?

  “You think you’re going to get rich leading mutts around?” I asked Adinah. “You think there’s big bucks in dog shit?”

  And he was there almost every time I came by. In her days with me, Becky liked to talk about how Marty could whistle any tune, how Marty told her stories about all the dogs. Itchy and Doodlehound and Fatface, he called them. I was paying rent so this sucker could sleep in my bed? Adinah said, “What do you care? He doesn’t live here.” If he ever moved in, I didn’t see it, because I had trouble showing up as often. It just wasn’t very pleasant to see how the waters had closed over what had once been my spot.

  I got offered a job in New York, a city I always liked, and it was better for everyone this way. I had Becky in the summers. Not every summer (I said no a few times) and not all summer, but we had a great August in the Catskills when she was six and she really liked her Brooklyn day camp when she was eight and she was in a great help-clean-up-the-parks program when she was in middle school.

  When Becky was twelve, Adinah switched to another Sufi group—she liked the leader better, he gave great talks, they had better music—and this group had kept its ties with Islam. My ex-wife was becoming a Muslim! “It’s kind of great,” she said. Fine with me. So when Becky spent her summers with me, did she have to be taken to a mosque? There was some discussion of this—was there even the right kind of mosque anywhere near me? actually, there was—and finally Becky was asked what she wanted, which was to be exclusively in Dad-land when she was with Dad. Later for the Sufis.

  A girlfriend I had at the time was spooked by the mosque thing. “So what are they telling your kid in there? And she has a Jewish father! Do they even know that?” That girlfriend didn’t last long. I did try to ask Becky what they were telling her in there. “Oh, you know,” she said. “The Unity of Being stuff. Opening the heart. The old usual.” She seemed to just take it for granted, one more thing the grown-ups invented. “And there’s prayers, of course.” What she liked to do with me was go to Burger King, since cheeseburgers were not served at home. We went to horror movies together too, a favorite illicit activity. And she had friends from her park camp, nice girls from what our mayor liked to call the gorgeous mosaic of our diverse city.

  What did I really think? Part of me thought Adinah was just filling her vacant life (the Marty guy was long gone, the dog-walking had to be a job with limited satisfactions) and part of me envied her. I was a serious person in my own way, but I’d stopped considering the unseen and how to work with it. I didn’t have what Adinah had, a capacity for devotion and a thirst to soar, an instinct for flight. I didn’t think she was crazy (were a billion Muslims in the world crazy?), but her parents must have thought that, if they even knew. They probably didn’t know.

  And I’d been to Muslim countries, by this time, once to photograph a famous slum in Cairo and once for a trade conference in Jakarta. In both places I heard by-the-by invectives against Israel and the Jews from locals chatting me up, and I’d kept my mouth shut about being Jewish. Which I later felt creepy about, although as a photojournalist I kept my mouth shut about a lot of things. But would I have been any happier if Adinah had converted to Catholicism or gone to live in an ashram or meditated with the Dalai Lama? The great chasm would still have been the
re, between the realms where our gazes were fixed. Between us.

  Over the years friends had asked if Adinah and I might get back together and I’d always said no. That was over. No pennies left in that piggy bank. We were, of course, tied forever by Becky. Sometimes I had daydreams of us in the same apartment again, back at the Door, and both of us better at it this time. You never forget certain years of being young. Not that I hadn’t fallen for other women—I’d had some long intrigues and some very hot flashes-in-the pan—but Adinah turned out to be my big deal. Who knew?

  Maybe Adinah was going to meet a nice fellow at the mosque. I knew they sat apart, men and women, but somebody’s brother? I tried feeling out Becky on this—were there committees her mom was on, were there bake sales or festivals or fund-raisers? Becky said, “It’s too boring for me to know.” I said, “I met your mom watching dervishes, did you know that?” “No,” she said.

  But I was the one who met somebody at a mosque. I was photographing an East Village mosque in a plain storefront building on First Avenue, for an article on flourishing traditions in the Big Apple. They paired me with a reporter named Frances, a go-getter who was very good at chatting up all the Bangladeshi and Bengali cabdrivers who left their shoes on shelves in the hall (I got a good shot of the shoes) before they went in to pray. She had an interview with the council president, in his endearingly crummy office, and drew out some quotable stuff from a Nigerian woman with five kids and a teenager with parents from Kolkata. Afterward we stuffed ourselves on smoky chicken and onions from the halal food cart across the street. She interviewed the cart guy too, who was Moroccan.

  She had short hair that was dyed too streaky and a funny, rough voice. When I said, “This is a lot less trouble than covering the guy who threw his mother down the elevator shaft,” she laughed so easily I thought, Oh, she likes me. I started telling her about that story—the mother was not a nice person—and she said, “Please. I had the one where a middle school kid stole crack from a teacher.” The conversation seemed very comradely to the two of us.

  She was closer to my age than I’d thought at first. She had a son older than Becky, she’d grown up in Staten Island, she had a brother who was a priest, and by the time I drove us back to the newsroom, we both knew something was starting between us.

  Frances was my big stroke of luck. She was not simple to be with (full of opinions she wouldn’t let rest), and during our first six months together she could never stay over because her boy was still in high school, but she was my best idea yet of who to love. Even Becky, who took a whole summer to come around, said, “Frances knows what’s going on.” Aside from her sex appeal, Frances was what my mother used to call a good egg. Once we got over some of the initial stupidities and misfirings, we were kind of dazzling as a couple.

  It wasn’t until the fourth year, when we actually moved in together, that Frances found herself talking to Adinah on the phone. The women were entirely civil and friendly, two rational beings—what did they have to fight over?—as they discussed Becky’s plane reservations from California. Dogs were barking in the background, Frances told me later, yap yap yap. Adinah provided home boarding, for extra bucks, when she could.

  “Doesn’t the Koran have something against dogs?” Frances said.

  “Not the Koran itself. Not at all. And she says there are different traditions,” I said.

  Frances did give me a look that said, She’s so odd, but it wasn’t a mean look.

  As it happened, I was stuck way up in East Harlem, shooting some cop talking about retirement benefits, when the World Trade Center was smashed to rubble by two planes. Once I could get through to Frances to make sure she was okay, once I called my mother in Florida to tell her I was fine, once they started flashing pictures of Osama bin Laden on the TV monitors at work, I kept thinking I had to get to California to protect Adinah and Becky from anti-Muslim bigots. They were sitting ducks, my girls. Becky was out of school and living at home, back at the Door till she could find a job. When I finally got Adinah on the phone, she said, “Oh! We were so worried about you. It’s so great to hear you’re all right. You’re all right?”

  “Please be careful,” I said. “Don’t parade around being a Muslim right now, okay?”

  “Careful how?” she said. “Do you think there’s a lynch mob in the streets?”

  “I don’t like to think of the two of you alone,” I said.

  “Becky’s out with the dogs now. And the mosque is fine too. I was just there. No problems.”

  “You were where?”

  “Of course. Everyone came. It was very moving.”

  “You took Becky with you?” I said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Adinah said Becky was twenty-three and could make her own decisions. “I’m not bringing her anyplace. I have to tell you, you’re thinking about this in entirely the wrong way. I know you want to guard us, but how? It’s kind of a grandiose idea about yourself. This is what happens to people’s egos without religion.”

  “Oh, is it?”

  “I’m sorry to say it is.”

  “This isn’t such a great week for religion,” I said.

  “In my house it is,” she said.

  “You know how you sound?”

  “I hate it when you’re an asshole,” she said.

  One of the photos I took at that time won a prize (a cop in a paper air-filter mask reading a wall of those early, futile posters for the missing). It wasn’t hard to catch a long, sad story in an instant during those days, and I was, first and foremost, a street photographer. My mother was so pleased about my getting a prize she talked about it nonstop. There were a lot better photos than the one I took, and I envied the people who got to the scene fast enough. “I wouldn’t tell anyone about this envy if I were you,” Frances said.

  I always wanted to be out in the world, taking in as much as I could take, and was this now creepy of me? Should I be mourning and not staring? The newsroom lost its rowdy, smart-alecky din around this time—people were stricken, solemn, formal. Reverent without a focus. We really didn’t know how to act. We reached for what we could reach for.

  In the middle of the next summer I got an email from Adinah. Hope you’re well and keeping out of trouble. I have a small request, she wrote. Like every Muslim who was able, she was called to make the hajj, the trip to Mecca. Some families from her mosque were going in February. Becky would take care of the dogs, the one thing she needed was permission. (She needed what?) I was still her legal husband. It was a simple consent form, I just had to sign, no big deal, she would send it to me. She was also short on money to pay for the trip, if I wanted to kick in, but that was up to me.

  My first thought was: She’ll be killed. They would find out she was Jewish. She was out of her mind, this present-day Adinah, and the fact of that was extremely painful to me. A deluded fifty-two-year-old woman, walking right out into traffic, too helpless to live in this world.

  “How would they know what she was born as?” Frances said. “Americans go on this thing all the time.”

  Frances was just talking. I looked at my newspaper’s files online. I could find nothing at all about murders in Mecca. There hadn’t been any riots or bombs since the eighties, but the hajj did have a history of accidental stampedes. In 1990 there had been a rush inside a pedestrian tunnel between Mecca and Mina and 1,426 pilgrims had died. In some other years only a hundred or so were trampled. A few dozen had died this year from meningitis, and there were always deaths from heat prostration. And at the end of the hajj, there was a ritual sacrifice, a massive slaughter of sheep, goats, and cows, on behalf of the pilgrims. Most of the butchered flesh went to the poor, but how could a woman who hadn’t eaten meat since 1971 be up for this?

  It gave me some degree of comfort that I could stop her. I could do that for her, at least, after all these years. Adinah, you don’t have a clue what you’re getting into, I wrote. Did you really think I or anyone with a brain would go along with this? It’s too insan
e. Sorry to be a party pooper, but that’s my opinion.

  You think you’re saving me, don’t you? Adinah wrote back. What a full-of-yourself jerk you are. You have everything backward. This is why Muslims go around saying only God is God. Get over yourself, okay? Soon.

  Frances said, “It’s bad enough she has to ask you—and you’re saying no? I don’t believe you.”

  Frances was very chilly to me, and she meant it—I had appalled her—and work was no picnic that week either. I was with a reporter who was covering the case of a couple who’d beaten the woman’s four-year-old son to death. We interviewed the grandmother, the neighbors, the social worker, the usual, and I hated hearing the details. Some grisly bits were hard to forget. Even the reporter, a hard-boiled guy, was pretty quiet afterward. I was angry that these facts, true as they were, had entered me. The writer and I got drunk together standing at a bar, downing shots of whiskey, old-style city-desk guys.

  That night I dreamed of Becky when she was maybe three, right after I first moved out, and she was pouncing on my back the way she used to when I read the paper at night. In my dream, I turned around and smacked her. As I once really had. In the dream, she was riding around on the back of a huge black dog, shrieking like a bird of prey in a horror movie, a vicious sound.

  Frances was asleep next to me when I woke up, in murky terror. I thought, It’s too hard, I can’t stand it, though I couldn’t have said what that meant. What I really thought was, a person shouldn’t remember too much.

  I stayed in the shower for a half hour the next morning, my version of all the ritual washing that religions go in for. I once saw a Muslim prayer room at an airport, where there was a spigot for ablutions. In the steam of the shower when I came out, I didn’t want to look in the mirror either. I hoped black coffee would help, and maybe it did.

  I had a hangover all day, a bad one, and I kept thinking about Adinah, how she had every right to go to Mecca or wherever the hell she wanted, I’d known that all along. There wasn’t enough mercy in the world. Let her go, let her be one of those pilgrims in the baking sun. It was entirely like her to want such a thing. And millions of people went to Mecca every year and came home fine. Every year.